HP Photosmart B8550 review

In the context of A3 photo printers, the HP Photosmart B8550 is almost a budget model, with an RRP of just £265. Does it have budget output though? Our tests suggest not - with crisp prints making the most of the machine's five ink tanks.

In the context of A3 photo printers, the HP Photosmart B8550 is almost a budget model, with an RRP of just £265. Does it have budget output though? Our tests suggest not - with crisp prints making the most of the machine's five ink tanks.

Colours came out vivid and vibrant, greys looked properly grey rather than shades of green or red. Our only real issue with the HP Photosmart B8550's prints was at the bottom end of the spectrum, where the darkest greys and blacks merged into each other. Not the best at handling shadow or subtlety.

With its focus on a different type of customer, the HP Photosmart B8550 ships with some hardware features the other printers deem too frivolous to include. For example, a built-in LCD screen helps you to configure the machine, as well as print direct from your camera through PictBridge or from a memory card.

At this price and with these features, the HP Photosmart B8550 is aimed squarely at everyday consumers – holiday snappers and poster makers – rather than at enthusiastic creatives. But with budgets squeezed hard for everyone, it wouldn’t be too much of a compromise for serious amateur photographers to plump for this model.

The HP Photosmart Plus B209 colour inkjet multifunction printer is well priced for student and home users. It also pumps out great-looking output quickly - something that few other models in its price class can achieve.

Hewlett-Packard has done a standout job with the HP Photosmart Pro B9180, a £500 high-end photo inkjet printer that brings the feature set and print quality of £1,000 printers to the desktop of any serious digital photographer or graphic artist.

HP's Photosmart Pro B8850 is a lower-priced version of the Photosmart Pro B9180 photo printer, offering that model's very good print quality and strong features (with a few intelligent omissions) at a lower price.